Good work

Next month Rotary International turns 100. Among others, Rotary clubs are celebrating the imminent global eradication of polio. Twenty years ago, there were a thousand new cases of polio every day. Now polio strikes only about 1,000 children a year. By next year, that number should be zero. Rotary has created the largest, most successful private health initiative ever.

When Rotary turned 75, its leaders decided to find a project that all its clubs — now in 168 countries — could work on together. An ophthalmologist in the Philippines asked Rotary to vaccinate Filipino children. It vaccinated 6 million, then did the same in five other nations. In 1985, Rotary decided to wipe out polio. This is crucial, as the challenge today is political. In August 2003, Muslim clerics from Kano, Nigeria, charged that the US had laced polio vaccine with drugs to render African girls infertile. Kano stopped vaccinating.

Nigerian strains of polio spread to 16 nations that had beaten the virus. Coincidentally, the president of Rotary International that year, Jonathan Maji-yagbe, was from Kano. He brokered a compromise: Kano would use vaccine made in Indonesia, a Muslim country. Although the countries Ka-no infected will have to sp-end millions on emergency vaccination campaigns, th-ey will probably be successful. — The New York Times